7/11/13 A Voice From the Classroom: When Professionals Meditate on Questions

The website, “Inquire Within” has inspired me more deeply with every blog entry. The multifarious strategies illustrate what happens when teachers go beyond formulas to create rich new methods in a spirit of inquiry. The ideas are so dazzling that it is hard to take one’s eyes from them and remember that this kind of unfettered professional exploration didn’t occur by accident. Somehow the blog authors themselves felt free to explore, take risks, even defy convention in their quests to inspire curiosity in their students. How does this happen?

Working as a consultant from AUSSIE/Editure with a group of teachers at the James P. Sinnott Magnet School for Health and Health Careers, a New York City public middle school in the East New York neighborhood of Brooklyn, I took some risks of my own to answer this question. The school is located in a decidedly poor neighborhood and has struggled over the years to find successful ways to put its students on pathways to achievement. But it was now in the second year of leadership under a new and visionary principal, Mrs. Valena Welch-Woodley, who wanted her staff to bond as a true professional learning community. A group of about ten teachers had been meeting after school on Fridays to explore methods, share ideas, and enjoy each other’s company. Many had observed that their students seemed to lack the kind of curiosity that they needed to be able to engage and persist in their studies. As the facilitator of the group, I thought it might be productive to experiment with a “quote-based seminar,” as I had come to call the process, around the idea of questions. Maybe if we wandered for a moment from the constant focus on methodology to freely explore our own thoughts, we would come back with rich and surprising ways to solve our problem.

In our meetings, we had been routinely using “writing-to-learn” techniques such as free-writes, stop-and-jots, and sum-it-ups. The teachers were used to writing as an open-ended way to discover their thinking, to sharing their writing, and to responding to the “golden lines” (words, phrases and sentences of interest) in each other’s writing. For this activity, I presented them with four quotes on the topic of questions, and invited them to pick one of the quotes, write why they picked it, and select from the quote itself a word or phrase of particular interest to share with the group.

These were the quotes:

Questions are waypoints on the path of wisdom. – Grant Lichtman, The Falconer

The difference between grappling and other forms of learning is that when the questions become the students’ own, so do the answers. – Sizer and Sizer, The Students Are Watching

Questions are places in your mind where answers fit. If you haven’t asked the question, the answer has nowhere to go. It hits your mind and bounces right off. You have to ask the question – you have to want to know – in order to open up the space for the answer to fit. – Clay Christensen as quoted by Jason Fried on “Why Can’t Someone Be Taught Until They’re Ready To Learn?” on Farnam Street blog

Great questions have legs. They propel the learning forward. – Ron Ritchhart in Making Thinking Visible and quoted by Edna Sackson in her “Great questions have legs…” blog post on What Ed Said

What the teachers shared astounded me. I am not sure I have ever heard such poetic language rise spontaneously from any group of writers in any other context. It was as though having the opportunity to forget answers and just focus on the deep nature of questions released some kind of untapped creative force. The effect on the group was tangible. They listened to each other with rapt attention, for a moment forming an almost – and I would hesitate to say this except for the fact that it reflects some of the teachers’ language – hallowed atmosphere. The feeling for me was similar to when I hear small orchestral groups perform in harmony.

I was not able to write down all of the words they wrote and read verbatim to each other that Spring afternoon, but here are a few of their “golden lines”:

“…reflection…aha moments that lead to wisdom…”

“…engages the mind on a quest to increase knowledge…”

“…great questions lead in several directions…”

“…a space in a puzzle…”

“…Socratic style leads to discussion, rapport – leads to other questions…”

“…you’re willing to work hard for a long, long time…”

“…answers that make you halt…”

“…like a snowball rolling down a hill…”

“…an answer that satisfies your soul…”

After a moment of silence, during which I think we all allowed ourselves to appreciate the music of our thoughts, we had a seminar-style discussion. Then we assessed the process itself. These are some of the words the participants said:

“Learning is a living thing.”

“I know in my heart I’m not satisfying their curiosity.”

“One thing done in a profound manner is worth so much more than….”

“Daydreaming to wish and hope.”

“When a culture loses its time to dream, it loses its soul.”

The poet Rainer Maria Rilke once wrote in a letter of advice, “Be patient toward all that is unsolved in your heart and try to love the questions themselves. Do not now seek the answers, which cannot be given you because you would not be able to live them. And the point is to live everything. Live the questions.” (Note this quote is used also in the earlier blog post: 12/06/09 Paragraph Six: Living With Questions.)

We adults certainly lived our questions that day in East New York, Brooklyn. I know the students will abide in theirs more deeply as a result.

6/07/11 A Voice from the Classroom: Reasons Not to Cry

Rock, folk, blues, country (oh, these labels!) singer Lucinda Williams has a lyric in her song “Reason to Cry” that goes, “When nothing makes any sense, you got a reason to cry.” The line’s been working my brain like a koan ever since I’ve heard it. I’ve been noticing a strong correlation between sensations of senselessness (does that make sense?) and crying, so to speak.

In school settings, you often see both figurative and literal tears shed by teachers who are, for whatever reason, having trouble making sense of the pressure they feel in the current climate of intense accountability. This pressure comes in many forms, and is worth a whole national debate over many years of time. Can sense be made in the meantime? Can teacher (and by extension student) tears be wiped away? Can didactic despair be transformed into pedagogical joy?

I have glimpsed rays of hope penetrating the canopy of our dark forest. All of them involve meaningful collaborative planning and ample classroom support. One of them in particular has recently captured my imagination as well as the fancies of nearly all of the teachers who have engaged with it: The International Baccalaureate Primary Years Programme (IBPYP).

It’s been my recent good fortune to be able to pitch in with three New York City public schools in quest of accreditation by this progressive and visionary program(me). In every case, when I have worked with teams developing what is called their “programme of inquiry” and planning their “units of inquiry,” I have heard the healthy laughter of people finding meaning in their work. In our reflections at the end of a day’s planning teachers have written, “We got a lot accomplished. We expressed ourselves freely,” or “This was productive. We established solid foundations. The themes are great,” or “We worked well together. We agreed. We aligned the units meaningfully with the comprehension strategies and writing units,” or “I like working with colleagues on what the grade will be learning, as opposed to being told what to teach.”

One of my favorites, from 4^th Grade Teacher Anna Luciano at PS 151 Q Global Communication and Foreign Language Magnet School, ran along like this: “This was fruitful, the first brick on a huge skyscraper. Everyone was enlightened on a different scale. We paid the utmost attention to detail, and to the wellbeing of the children.”

How do you explain such reviews? (And I assure you nearly all of the others are equally positive.)

The answer is not simple. The teachers are treated like professionals; the teachers collaborate in teams; a larger purpose pervades the work – these are the first notions that come to mind. It helps that the IBPYP requires collaboration and the empowerment of teachers, and the focus on a progressive mission, the center of which is the wellbeing of the children. It is also understood by all to be a long-term effort, a solid edifice, like that skyscraper to be constructed from one blueprint by many hands.

What are the details to which the utmost attention must be paid? Might our answer be found, like the devil, among them? Detail A: The school’s mission must be congruent with the International Baccalaureate’s mission of internationalism, peace, caring and compassion. Detail B: The Programme of Inquiry must be constructed of units that address six “transdisciplinary themes” that are explored and built upon each year. Detail C: Each unit revolves around a “central idea” (an “enduring understanding” in backwards planning parlance). Detail D: The summative task of each unit is usually a project involving student-generated action. Detail E: Each unit embodies foundational “key concepts” such as form, function, causation, change and the like. Detail F: The units are driven by carefully crafted teacher questions and “provocations” that set up student questions to be organized into “lines of inquiry….”

And these are just a few of the details. Plenty of hidey-holes for the devil here! Which is, indeed, why the utmost care needs to be paid.

The details come in many dimensions. To list them all would be to trivialize them. One dimension worth delving into, though, is the “student profile.” Planning is undertaken to assure that students become inquirers, knowledgeable, thinkers, communicators, principled, open-minded, caring, risk-takers, balanced and reflective.

Tellingly, the teachers are expected to exemplify and model these attributes. It’s much easier to make sense of things when you can ask questions, think for yourself, take risks and find balance in your life. So I reflect, anyway.

The unmentioned secret to all of this is that it’s often fun. A teacher “provocation” (known in the New York metropolitan area as a “motivation”) that I enjoyed imagining was the one where a classroom, to begin a study of earthquakes, was turned topsy-turvy, desks thrown over and books scattered about. When the students arrived and saw the disaster, they were shocked into the beginning of true understanding.

Another enjoyable aspect is the generation of student questions. Here are a few I recently gathered that would set anyone’s brain in motion: “Why is everything made in China?” “What is Spam?” “Did you know we have tiny little hairs on our tongues?” “How did the baby get out of her?”

Of course there is a disquieting side to this that must be addressed as well, no denying it. How does a teacher answer the question, “Will we get suspended for writing about someone getting stabbed?”

Wisely, I suggest. And not by answering, so much as by turning it into a “line of inquiry” into the roots of violence. Wouldn’t that be a sensible way for teachers to help the students handle their reasons to cry, and bring them around step by detailed step to healing action and the hopeful joys of learning?

4/3/11 A Voice from the Classroom: The Puzzle of Trust

Last year I was meeting with Mr. O- in his classroom in a high school for emotionally disabled children, when Tyreek (not his real name) slipped in. A slender kid with a serious, intellectual demeanor, he approached me and asked if he could have a look at the ballpoint pen in my pocket. New at the school, I was still naïve about the ways of the students, and felt it could only be a decent gesture to trust him. Bad move. He sidled to the other side of the room, began dismantling the pen, and, when asked to return it by Mr. O-, made his escape to the hallway.

            I gave up on ever seeing it again. I had some regret. It was a monogrammed pen with my name on it, given to me by a teacher a couple of months before. It wrote smoothly, the grip was just right, and I treasured it. Mr. O- looked out into the hall, warned Tyreek that he was on the verge of getting into trouble, and he finally gave it up, mangled, but all there.

            My next time in Mr. O-‘s classroom, Tyreek gravitated toward me as soon as he saw me and asked it he could see that pen again. This time I was prepared. I had stocked my pocket with a number of cheap ballpoint pens, and gave him one. He inspected it, kept it and asked me for a dollar.

            Asking for a dollar at this particular school is a ritual performed by many of the students. By persisting, they occasionally get one. I don’t begrudge them this. Most come from shelters, broken homes, group homes…they’re not the types to have allowances or be able to hold down jobs after school. Knowing some of the teachers strategically rewarded the students with small change when they behaved well, I felt it was okay to respond this way as well, but I wasn’t going to give the money away for free. “Write me a poem, and I’ll give you a dollar,” I said.

            Tyreek sat down and immediately composed a poem full of salty language, intending to get that dollar, but not to make me happy. But he had complied. I hadn’t set any standards. So I paid him for it.

            After the summer vacation, I returned to the school, and ran into Tyreek in Mr. O-’s class again, even though he’d moved on to another teacher for the year. He just felt safe and welcome with the gentle Mr. O- during his free periods. Before Tyreek could say anything, I gave him a ballpoint pen, and, as before, he asked me for a dollar. Thinking of the colorful results I’d gotten last time, I said I’d have to think about it. But Mr. O- and I were trying a little experiment with lesson planning: inviting kids in after their last class to help us plan in exchange for some snacks. (A practiced validated by the likes of Aristotle, Montaigne, and, more recently, research reported in a 12/10/2010 New York Times article, “What Works in the Classroom? Ask the Students.”) I asked Mr. O- if Tyreek could sit with us too, even though he didn’t teach him any more. Mr. O- agreed.

            I was a little surprised when Tyreek showed up. He sat with us and three other students for an hour while we discussed ideas and teaching methods and came up with lesson plans. He was surprisingly mature and articulate, given the way he’d presented himself to me so far. He had useful insights. I began to see him in a different light, not as a needy, misguided, disabled teenager, but as a responsible and interesting young adult. It further intrigued me when Mr. O- pointed out he was a talented piano player, and he confirmed it.

            At the end of our planning session, Tyreek asked for another dollar. By that time, only one of the other kids was left. He caught on and asked for a dollar too. Mr. O- and I agreed they could each earn fifty cents if they wrote a reflection on the planning session, which they both did. Tyreek’s was thoughtful. He earned his fifty cents.

            A few weeks later, I saw Tyreek in the hallway. As usual, I gave him a ballpoint pen, and as usual he asked for a dollar. Given how responsible he had been in the planning meeting, I went out on a limb and said I would pay him if he wrote me another poem. But it couldn’t be laced with obscenities, I said. It had to be a legitimate poem that could, say, be published in the school’s poetry anthology. And it had to have at least seven lines. He asked where I would be at a certain period, and I told him I would be in a teacher’s classroom. He showed up there and sat apart from the other students to write his poem.

            In a few minutes, with nothing on the paper, he called me over to ask what he should write the poem about. I said, “Something that’s important to you.” He bent to the task, and, in a few minutes, handed me a poem that spoke of his love for his family and friends, his desire to get out of school and go to college, find a good job, buy a house, have a wife and children. I took him out to the hall to pay him his dollar, not wanting other students to see this transaction and get any ideas that would break my bank.

            After I paid him, he slipped the pen I had given him back into my pocket, intact, a moment I enjoyed at the time, and have enjoyed every time I remember it since.

2/25/11 A Voice from the Classroom: Three Puzzles

Three puzles: (1) How can I continue this blog effectively when I’m too busy to write it well? (2) Do crossword puzzles belong in the classroom? (3) How can we find the best way to teach each student? I’ll tackle them one at a time, bringing up along the way the research I promised in my last post.

Puzzle #1: I can’t. That one was easy! Which is why this blog took so long to appear since the last one. I’ve lately been reading a book on wisdom called, well, “Wisdom” (with the subtitle “From Philosophy to Neurscience”) by Stephen S. Hall. He inscribed a note to me: “Dare to be wise!” I dare say it’s wise to take the pressure off, lead a more balanced life, and write when I can. (His book, incidentally, has many implications for teaching. I agree with him that wisdom can – and must – be taught in the classroom.)

Puzzle #2: A high school teacher who I coach was disappointed that her principal had forbidden her to use crossword puzzles in her US History classroom, on the grounds they weren’t rigorous enough. I concur with that position if the crossword puzzles are being used merely as fancy worksheets to keep kids busy. But in a December 7, 2010 New York Times Science Times  article entitled “Tracing the Spark of Creative Problem-Solving,” Benedict Carey says, “Puzzle-solving is such an ancient, universal practice… precisely because it depends on creative insight, on the primitive spark that ignited the first campfires.”

I want my students having creative insights and lighting metaphoric campfires, don’t you?

Carey says further that neuroscientists at Northwestern University discovered that test subjects were “more likely to solve word puzzles with sudden insight when they were amused, having just seen a short comedy routine.”

According to Carey, our puzzle-barring principal should not only let her teacher use puzzles, then, but lighten up and allow a few laughs, too!

Here’s another piece of research that backs up my conviction that crossword puzzles belong in a well-crafted curriculum: Sam Dillon’s article in the same edition of the Times, “What Works in the Classroom? Ask the Students,” discusses research that, surprise, surprise, students know what works for them in the classroom. I experienced this when a high school teacher at another school complained that her students didn’t do their homework. We designed a student questionnaire to see what they had to say about this lamentable situation. Among their recommendations were to give crossword puzzles as homework because (a) many students liked to do them, and (b) they could be done on busses. Seems the students spend a lot of down time on busses that could be used for study before having to work at jobs, or take care of siblings at home. Who would have thought of this but students?

In another of my classrooms, a teacher in a high school for emotionally disabled children created packets of differentiated materials so they could have something to focus on individually instead of fighting. (I was an eyewitness to these brawls. A hockey game would look tame next to her classroom.) The packets were an unqualified success. Though their pugilistic skills waned, students’ academic skills improved rapidly. This seemed a reasonable trade-off. One critical, and particularly engaging element of the packets? Crossword puzzles.

In “Tracing the Spark of Creative Problem-Solving,” Benedict Carey goes on to say, “This and other research suggests that the appeal of puzzles goes far deeper than the dopamine-reward rush of finding a solution. The very idea of doing a crossword or a Soduku puzzle typically shifts the brain into an open, playful state that is itself is a pleasing escape….” For teachers, an escape from boredom into learning.

So, opening the envelope to reveal my answer to Puzzle #2…yes!

On to Puzzle #3: I knew you didn’t really expect this one to be solved in the space of a blog post. But it is a question worth reflecting on, wouldn’t you say?

Before reflecting on the puzzle of teaching, though, I would point out something that is not in question: that we must believe in students and connect to them as fellow human beings, without prejudice. Once that little certainty is taken care of, we can get on with solving the puzzle of how to instruct them.  I defer to Leo Tolstoy on this point:

The best teacher is the one who can instantly recognize what is bothering a particular student. This ability in turn gives the teacher a knowledge of the greatest possible number of methods; the ability to invent new methods; and above all – rather than blind adherence to one method – the conviction that all methods are one-sided, that the best possible method is the one that answers best all the possible difficulties incurred by the student. This is not a method, but an art and a talent. – Leo Tolstoy, in “On Methods of Teaching the Rudiments,” quoted in “Tolstoy as Teacher: Leo Tolstoy’s Writings on Education,” ed. Bob Blaisdell, trans. Chris Edgar, Teachers & Writers Collaborative.

How lucky we are, as educators, to have such a puzzle to work on, shifting our brains into open, creative states with our art and talent. I just hope, for the students’, and, by extension, civilization’s, sake, that we can enjoy the search for solutions amid the pressures and fears we face in the profession today. How wise of us, if we can.

12/12/10 A Voice from the Classroom: The Learning Pyramid and the Chinese Room

Have you ever seen the famous (or infamous, depending on your opinion of its validity) “Learning Pyramid”? Its basic claim is that as a learner you retain 5% of what you hear, 10% of what you read, 20% of what you both hear and see, 30% of what is demonstrated to you, 50% of what you discuss, 75% of what you practice by doing, and 90% of what you teach to others.

It is a too simplistic explanation of how humans learn, and its research origins are lost in the mists of time along with the true identity of Shakespeare, what the Druids were really up to at Stonehenge, and which came first, the chicken or the egg. Even so, I find it useful when I’m trying to jump-start something interesting in didactic classrooms where students are falling asleep. I also find some truth in it for myself.

Take, for instance, what I retain from what I listen to. Even if I’m interested and dialing up my willpower to the pain threshold, I have a hard time keeping focus. My mind is just a natural wanderer. Even so, I am addicted to audio CDs of lectures from The Teaching Company, which I listen to on my way to schools, to plug the gaps in my own educational history. Lately, I have been listening to the esteemed Professor Daniel N. Robinson lecture me on The Great Ideas of Philosophy.

There’s irony to this, because when I was in college I tried listening to my philosophy teacher, Professor Jobes, without any retention to speak of. So why repeat the same learning modality? I’m older now and though my hearing is worse my interest has deepened. Also I can rewind Robinson to listen again, where I had no chance to rewind Jobes.

Even with the rewinding, 5% is probably the maximum of what I retain from the lectures, but it tends to be one helluva 5%. Without it, I would never have been able to contemplate, and apply to educational practice, philosopher John Searle’s “Chinese Room.”

Breaker of secret German codes in WW II, noted mathematician, and early computer theorist Alan Turing posited the idea that humans, as problem-solvers, are basically computational devices in fleshy form. In defense of our neural dignity, philosopher John Searle countered with his metaphor of the Chinese Room.

Imagine a windowless room inhabited by an English-speaking human being – say a NYC high school sophomore. She has a stack of cards with Chinese ideograms on them. She doesn’t know Chinese and has no idea which way is up, or the order in which the cards should be placed. A helpful person – say a NYC high school teacher – slips instructions in English to the student through the crack under the door. Following the instructions to the letter, the student posts the cards in the right position and order on the wall. Along comes a Chinese speaking person, who opens the door and is delighted to read Du Fu’s “On Visiting the Temple of Laozi.”

Would you say the student knew Chinese?

Searle’s point was that a machine could do what the student did, but it couldn’t do what the Chinese visitor did: i.e., make Wittgensteinian meaning of the symbols.

This idea of the Chinese Room has been a focusing notion as I travel through classrooms in my work. To what extent am I seeing, and perhaps inadvertently promoting, the production of artificial, versus real, intelligence? To what extent is the students’ experience a simulacrum, versus a real, learning experience? Is it bad to do “test prep,” where we provide students with algorithms and templates for Regents exams so they have something to hang onto when they fight the monster in the pit? Is this a version of “fake it ’till you make it” – teaching a form that they will infuse with meaning as they grow? Or are we teaching them not to think? What will they ultimately hang onto?

My convictions flare up like a chronic case of bursitis here. They nag me in the face of temptation to do the work of students for them. Even with the pressure to have high scores on the tests we can’t relent. This isn’t so easy when you get frustrated watching students struggle with their learning – as I would certainly struggle to learn Chinese. Still, we have to stick to it.

Convictions aren’t enough, however. We have to have strategies. In my last blog post, I mentioned a graphic organizer called a history frame, which allowed students to work in groups on different parts of the total picture. The various groups combined their puzzle pieces at the end of the class, teaching each other not just the facts, but also the meanings of the Battle of New York. The teacher had never believed in anything but chalk and talk practices. Now, with the evidence that the students could think for themselves as well as work together, perhaps her practice will change, a change in her convictions following on the heels of practice. I owe the designers of the history frame a beer for this possibility. A nice brew-pub stout.

So I try to act when my convictions nag, but my doubts linger. Am I sure the test-prep – the instructions slipped under the door – wouldn’t help? Mightn’t a higher score based on some handy artifice give courage to my struggling students (and some helpful lines on their transcripts)?

A couple of recent research studies, not to mention the Common Core State Standards, seem to back up my beliefs. I’ll delve into them next time. Meanwhile, I intend to deploy the intuitive and practical, if not the academic, validity of the Learning Pyramid, and keep enjoying “practicing by doing,” and “teaching to others” whatever I learn from examining classrooms through the metaphor of the Chinese Room.

11/22/10 A Voice from the Classroom: Swimming in the Lake of Literature

Let’s say you’ve secured beachfront property on the lake of literature (see my last blog post for the source of that reference) for all of your students. Unlike the lakes in resorts and gated communities, this one defies the laws of physics and provides space for anyone who can reach its shores.

So many things to be done in its waters: wading, swimming, diving, sailing, fishing, skiing, tubing…. What are your students doing when they read?

This week I worked in the classrooms of several teachers whose students were standing at the edge of the water, the ripples lapping lightly at their toes, afraid even to wade. What did the swimmers know that they didn’t? What skills did those re-creating themselves in the H2O possess that they didn’t?

English teacher Tamara Durant, of the Special Education Department at George Westinghouse High School in Brooklyn, assessed her students as they dipped their toes into Walter Dean Myers’ book Sunrise Over Fallujah. “Nothing was happening in their heads,” as she put it. So she assembled them into a guided reading group (a stage of the balanced literacy cycle) and helped them form pictures by clarifying images and defining words as they progressed through a chapter. To see whether the support was working, she used double-entry journals. A quote on the left described a soldier seeing a boy get killed. On the right side, students responded in writing to these prompts:

“I wonder______________.”

“I feel__________because_________.”

“This makes me think___________because_______________.”

Having developed images of the action with her help, the three boys in her group were able to write. They were taking their strokes, heading out to deeper water. When one boy said he felt “bad” about the boy’s death, Tamara brainstormed other words with him, until he redefined his feeling as “sad.” We later discussed the idea of presenting the students with a continuum of words for this emotion: “devastated… horrified… shocked… depressed… sad… bad… okay… good…happy… merry… delighted… joyous… ecstatic.” To choose among them would require yet deeper diving.

I took one boy aside during the workshop section of the class and had him read a passage aloud to me, while I recorded his successes and miscues in a “running record” adapted for use with adolescent readers. Looking over the results later with Tamara, we discovered he was stumbling on words that weren’t important to the gist of the passage: “Kevlar” and “Nasiriyah.” When the surface of the text became clear of such floating debris, he sailed more smoothly along, but probably wouldn’t have persevered without me to urge him on. We decided two mini-lessons for the whole class were warranted by this, one on determining which words were essential to comprehension, and another on self-monitoring for meaning, which would lead to the use of “fix-up” strategies.

Tamara Durant is an effective swimming – I mean reading – coach. Books are not just for the country club set in her class. The essential question guiding the inquiry of her lessons is, “How can ordinary people become heroes?” I would nominate as a hero the student who volunteered for the running record with me. His journey (see “The Hero Journey of a Reader” in a former blog post) led the way safely into the water for his classmates.

Let’s stop to think of the consequences of swimming without instruction. Researching a news event I vaguely remembered, of a group of teens on a church trip who ventured into a Louisiana bayou waters for a swim only to drown for lack of skill, I stumbled upon innumerable similar incidents from the last decade, in states across the union. Students who drown in the treacherous waters of texts may not die physically, but something surely dies intellectually, academically, and emotionally. This makes the news in terms of standardized test scores, but we rarely see the names of teens who went under in their reading.

This is a shame, when there are so many ways to keep them afloat. In earlier posts we looked at research into various reading methods, and the invention of less formal ones congruent with the research: the “Oyster Knife Method” and the “Tarzan Method.” A well-known but underused device that I used in another special education class at George Westinghouse provided a life raft for social studies students: a modification of the “story frame,” called the “history frame.” This graphic organizer includes boxes for the title of an event, the participants, the place, the time, the problem, the key episodes, the resolution, and the theme. A copy can be downloaded Here.

Knowing how much the new Common Core State Standards suggest that teachers across the curriculum share the responsibility of teaching reading, I had the students in this class work on a full history frame individually at first to assess their skills. I then divided them into groups to work at tiered levels of the history frame. They created posters, which, once combined, showed all of the details of the historical event to the whole class.

The reluctant readers in this class came alive as they worked, asking questions about vocabulary and meaning, helping each other comprehend and write. It was, for all practical purposes, like watching students splashing safely in a warm summer lake. On the continuum of emotions, my own feelings as they worked were, let’s see…somewhere beyond delighted, approaching joyous.

11/07/10 A Voice from the Classroom: Property on the Lake of Literature

Last weekend a tornado of workshop planning, bathroom repairs, and out-of-town visitors wiped out the time I needed to follow up on my blog post “The Hero Journey of a Reader.” Gina gave me a pass. Thank you, Gina.

            First, an update on the “Tarzan Method” of reading. Cecily Iddings, a teacher of high school Global Studies students at District 75’s Lillian L. Rashkis school, tried it with the 1689 English Bill of Rights. She wrote the text double-spaced on chart paper. Her students interpolated their responses, and wrote summaries in spaces at the end of paragraphs. The colorfully lettered charts became a teaching tool in her room. She reports, “I used text that was edited down into manageable chunks by Mr. Hermance of mrhermance.net (he and his website are awfully cool and worth checking out, full of good materials). I was excited that even my pre-primer reader was participating – he’s got really good listening comprehension and did a nice job of picking out important words and meanings.”

            About last post’s “Hero Journey,” what might we learn from the pitfalls – that some students didn’t read The Omnivore’s Dilemma, their summer assignment, and my daughter needed me as a Vergil to guide her through its infernal layers?

            Let’s round up the usual models, which have proven so sturdy through the years:

            The balanced literacy model, with its attendant workshop structure, teaches us to demonstrate strategies for the students, read alongside them, guide the ones who struggle, enrich the ones who soar, confer with all about their challenges and successes, and assess their ability to go ahead independently. Why should summer reading be any different? Since students will be reading without coaches at their elbows, all the more imperative to launch them into the project knowing what they can do. Start the reading in the school and provide summertime supports for those who need it: reading buddies, email help, graphic organizers….

            The backwards planning model teaches us to be clear about our purposes. Have we really thought about why we want students to scale hard texts? If the purpose is to climb the mountain “because it’s there,” that might not be so motivating. On the other hand, if the purpose is to deeply understand a concept, then we might assign dynamic texts and provide reflection prompts based on essential questions. This would give them a motivating focus as they proceed, a rope for belaying into the depths. Or the summer reading might be seen as a multilayered “I-Search”-style research process, where students probe a meaningful topic while tracking their own growth as readers.

            At my daughter’s school, The Omnivore’s Dilemma was well-aligned with the school’s mission:

Inspired by the power of collaboration, we challenge our students to soar intellectually and to act bravely in our complex world community.

            The plan was for students to not only discuss the book in their ELA classes, but use it as a resource in health class action projects. So, check backwards planning off the list. But the balanced literacy support wasn’t there. Possible next steps for the teachers: map reader’s workshop days into the curriculum at the end of the year to launch the book, then send students off with a resource packet that might include tallying when, where, why and what they ate off their plates as well as their tastings of the text.

            This would certainly give freshen up Francis Bacon’s moldy old adage:

Some books are to be tasted, others to be swallowed, and some few to be chewed and digested….

            Although I would argue that “Differentiated Instruction” is less a model than a concept (that instruction needs to fit the student rather the student fit the instruction), it teaches us to offer choices about how to read and what products students might produce as a result of the reading: songs, videotapes, comic books, how-to guides, persuasive essays….

            In agreement with the Common Core State Standards, I caution against requiring less complex texts when there are plenty of pathways into the complex ones. Once, as an experiment before all of this recent talk of text complexity, I tried reading Walt Whitman’s “There Was a Child Went Forth” to kindergartners. I invited them just to listen to the music of the language, and maybe, like Cecily’s pre-primer reader, pick a word or two to savor. They were enraptured with the resonant music, and picked “phoebe bird” as their favorite words. Cute, right? But serious, too, how it led to a mini-research project into phoebe birds. Whitman would have been pleased, I think.

            Underlying my advice is a personal belief. To express it I turn to a quote in a book recently published by my friend Lewis Hyde. The book, about preserving the intellectual commons, which should concern us deeply as teachers, is called Common as Air: Revolution, Art and Ownership. The quote in the book is by writer Jean Rhys:

I don’t believe in the individual Writer so much as in Writing…. All of writing is a large lake. There are great rivers that feed the lake, like Tolstoy and Dostoyevsky…. All that matters is feeding the lake. I don’t matter. The lake matters.

            Feeding the lake may be all that matters to writers, but feeding from the lake is what matters to readers. Our duty as teachers is to bequest to each student a section of lakefront property, so they can enjoy its waters without barriers.

10/17/10 A Voice from the Classroom: The Hero Journey of a Reader

Jeff Schneider has written to elaborate on (and correct) my description in the last blog post of his “Tarzan Method” of reading:

I am glad you have tried to use my method. However, when the reader chooses a sentence she must write a comment about it — not explain what it means. That is important since there should be no stakes in understanding the sentence.  She should explain why is it important or repulsive or interesting. The reader should choose sentences she understands or thinks she understands then try to put them together to understand an argument. The Treaty of Versailles is possible to use, but it is not a something I would give as an example. I use speeches by Lincoln or Kennedy or ML King, for example. For the Treaty of Versailles, I would have the students edit it to a few pages to find the essentials. Then they could work in groups to find the ten most important aspects. Then they would discuss them.

            Jeff puts the steering wheel of the reader’s experience firmly in the reader’s hands. The journey belongs to the student, not the teacher, even as the teacher guides her. When she arrives at the teacher’s curricular goal, she has a trunk full of rich memories to give personal value to the academic understanding.

            What about my daughter, and her journey (also mentioned in my last blog post) through the dense jungle of The Omnivore’s Dilemma? Did it realize my hope that while it began in dread, it might continue in curiosity and end in triumph?

            Depends on your point of view.

            To compare and contrast my point of view with hers, I’ve constructed a grid to analyze the story through the plot points of the hero’s journey (largely derived from digests of Joseph Campbell’s Hero With a Thousand Faces):

A READER’S JOURNEY
THE HERO’S JOURNEY	MY DAUGHTER’S POV	MY POV
	A. DEPARTURE
1. The Call to Adventure	She receives her summer assignment.	I hear about it and find out she has agreed with her Mom to read the book during her summer travels.
2. Refusal of the Call	She reads the introduction, stops, and goes into denial about reading the rest of the book.	I assume she is reading as planned while she is away.
3. Supernatural Aid	She knows unconsciously that she’ll never get away with refusing to read the book.	I call her on a supernatural device (a cell phone) and she says she is making progress, but I am suspicious, and start planning what to do about it if indeed she isn’t reading.
4. The Crossing of the First Threshold	She returns home and “crosses into the field of adventure… venturing into an unknown and dangerous world,” i.e., the first chapters of the book.	I institute my Vergil-like plan of guiding her through the inferno by reading alongside her, using a variation of Jeff’s “Tarzan Method.”
5. The Belly of the Whale	She “separates between her known world and self” and “shows her willingness to…die to herself,” basically knowing I will kill her if she doesn’t read the book.	By rationing out the chapters among the remaining days of summer, we see the inevitable, horrible, tortuous path laid out before us.
B. INITIATION
1. The Road of Trials	At opposite ends of the couch, sometimes with our ankles crossed for comfort, she slogs through chapter after chapter on the cornfields, industrial processing plants and feedlots of the corn belt, underlining lines to share with me.	Ditto, except that I am reading with the horror and fascination one has watching a car wreck, appreciating the careful descriptions of the irresponsible and unhealthy way we feed ourselves these days.
2. The Meeting with The God	Though she is probably already contemplating a divorce in the future, she experiences a “sacred marriage” with the text, i.e., she realizes she can get through chapters without me in the room.	I agree to read separately as long as we share our “Tarzan branches” with each other later. We proceed apace this way.
3. Fellow Student as Tempter	She is tempted to abandon the quest, and petitions for reprieve on the grounds that “most of the other students aren’t reading the book.”	Hypothesizing that she will later celebrate the glory of a triumph she can’t yet anticipate, I don’t let her off the hook.
4. Atonement with the Father	She reaches the center point of her journey and realizes she might make it through. Sometimes she reads alone, sometimes with me, moaning and groaning with far less frequency.	I feel a shift in her will to persevere, and my load begins to lift as I trust her to take more responsibility for her progress.
5. Apotheosis	She doesn’t exactly experience “a god-like state” or consider herself to be “in heaven and beyond all strife” but she does seem to be breathing easier as we approach the end of the book. She is often getting ahead of me.	Sometimes I can’t share underlinings because I have to skip a chapter or two to catch up with her. I continue to monitor her progress, though, and admire the comprehension and articulation that came with so much difficulty earlier on.
6. The Ultimate Boon	She finishes the book! She has “achieved the goal of the quest.” She feasts on the free time she has now, as if were the “plant that supplies immortality.”	I go back to read chapters I missed, for my own edification, feeling proud of my daughter and patting myself on the back for coaxing her through.
C. RETURN
1. Refusal of the Return	This is where she seems to go off the heroic path, as she is all too happy to abandon the book and “come back to normal life with all its cares and woes.”	I am forced to accept that my script of ultimate triumph may need to be revised.
2. The Magic Flight	She has to be careful here, because it can be “just as dangerous returning from the journey as to go on it,” i.e., she might be teased by fellow students (fifty percent, by her estimate) who didn’t read the book.	I don’t have much power over this, but I can contribute to an atmosphere in our family that rewards honesty, effort and the taking of intellectual risks.
3. Rescue from Without	Her teacher back at school facilitates a discussion of the book, and she is able to participate with authority, fitting in with academically inclined friends.	I’m grateful she attends a school where, when it counts, students are ultimately respected by all for their academic performance.
4. The Crossing of the Return Threshold	Can she “retain the wisdom gained on her quest?” By her own admission, she is “more careful about my eating habits.”	I see this in action when, on a family trip, given the opportunity to eat at Wendy’s, she says, “No way!” even though that means we have to postpone lunch for an hour.
5. Master of the Two Worlds	She is just sailing along in life now, about as “comfortable and competent in both inner and outer worlds” as a teenager can be.	Life goes on in our household. She does her homework, signs up for clubs, helps her mother and me in a research project on text complexity.
6. Freedom to Live	It’s a bit much to ask a reading experience to lead to “freedom from fear of death,” but she doesn’t seem to particularly be “anticipating the future or regretting the past.”	This is doubtless just teenage obliviousness, and not any kind of spiritual enlightenment, but, hey, you never know! And…she doesn’t seem to fear the new complex texts she confronts in her studies.

 

            Gina, what do you think about my having gone over the word count in this blog? I would hate to leave interested readers hanging on this hero’s story. That’s all right with you? If I write proportionally fewer words next time? Deal.

            In the meantime, readers, enjoy your journeys. May you permanently be free of the fear of complex texts.

10/03/10 A Voice from the Classroom: Tarzan, Oyster Knives and Text Complexity

Welcome to the rebirth of Paragraph Six, now under a new name: “A Voice from the Classroom.” The spirit is the same, and its mission to nurture the joy of teaching by freely exploring its human dimensions also remains unchanged. So why the new moniker? My supportive and professional sponsor Gina Scala requested that I change it to something that identified the post more accurately with educational themes. I agreed this might be a good idea.

            So what might be an educational theme of interest this Fall? Unless you just arrived from Mars, or any country on Earth outside the United States, you know that this nation is now obsessed with the new Common Core State Standards (www.corestandards.org) and their elaborate appendices, including Appendix A of the ELA (and “Literacy in History/Social Studies. Science and Technical Subjects”), which begins with a heartfelt dissertation on “text complexity.”

            For my part, I have marched head-on into text complexity in two ways. First, I’m on an AUSSIE team doing research on the issue for the NYC Department of Education. Second, I’m watching my 10^th grade daughter grapple with it in the trenches of classroom reading.

            The two ways actually converge. But first, let’s talk about my daughter’s reading. This summer she was assigned Michael Pollan’s delicious (to me) book The Omnivore’s Dilemma. Where I salivated at the idea of digging into it, she responded to the assignment as if it were a wedge of stinky cheese left out on the counter a few days too long. “Why should I want to read this book? It’s all about corn,” she said.

            Beyond the book’s unappetizing topic, the (to her) aimless sentences and impossible vocabulary were formidable. It might as well have had the subtitle Abandon Hope All Ye Who Enter Here. She was fully ready to skip the assignment and face the consequences back at school. Whatever they might be, they surely couldn’t be worse than burning in the fires of this literary inferno.

            Fortunately, or unfortunately, depending on your point of view, she is the daughter of a literacy coach. Failure to read was unacceptable on my watch. She was not only going to comprehend the book. I intended to go for the gold and have her enjoy it.

            It was going to be a journey. When you stop and think about it, every reading experience is a kind of journey. Some may be quick sallies to the local junk food restaurant, others are mountain climbing expeditions on Mount Everest, but each has a beginning, middle and end. For my child, I envisioned one beginning in dread, continuing in curiosity, and ending in joyous triumph with Beethoven’s “Ode to Joy” for the final soundtrack.

            Only fools go on expeditions ill equipped, however. For tools, I chose two variations on the strategy of “quote analysis” that I have found useful for handling difficult texts: the Tarzan Method and the Oyster Knife Method. Don’t bother to look them up (although when I googled them to be sure they weren’t already claimed, I did find the Tarzan Method listed as a strategy for bridge construction – not a bad association with reading, when you think of it). This is their debut in, and perhaps simultaneous exit from, the literature. They both rely on the principal of the “golden line” discussed in earlier posts.

            The Tarzan Method was invented by my upstairs neighbor Jeff Schneider, who is a New York City Public High School history teacher. In it, you take a scary text, say the Treaty of Versailles, and you swing along through the incomprehensible foliage until you find a sentence you can understand, and you grab onto it for dear life. You underline it and maybe write a little something that you think about it. Then you swing along to another branch and do the same. You come back to class with your collection of branches, share them with others, and pretty soon, by discussing the various sentences, you build an understanding of the text. You exit courageous, as would anyone who’d just dared so many lions and tigers and bears.

            The Oyster Knife Method is similar. Visualize a hard text – The Omnivore’s Dilemma being a perfect example – as an oyster in its crusty, impenetrable shell. Try to read it without a point of entry, and you break your teeth and get sand in your mouth. Not a pleasant way to develop either your reading skills or your content knowledge. You need a way in to get to the sweet stuff. So find the crack in the shell, anything you understand, insert the knife of comprehension and shuck it with your mind: record the sentence you understand, write about it, have a friend write about it, and another friend after that. Here is a graphic organizer I used in a school where a sociology teacher, whose students attended his class because he was entertaining, but failed it because they couldn’t read the texts, found a measure of success:

Quotation:

My Response:

First Classmate’s Response:

Second Classmate’s Response

My Final Thoughts:

 

            There are plenty of good reasons for students to comprehend and appreciate every subtle nuance of well-crafted texts. Accused of evading those reasons, I proudly say I’m guilty as charged when it comes to these methods. Before convicting me, though, consider that students are beginning to appreciate a few of the orchids in a lush forest they would otherwise avoid entirely (or, to keep my metaphors consistent, tasting delicacies they would never have savored before). See it as the first step of their life-long reading journey.

            What about my safari with my daughter through the forbidding landscape of The Omnivore’s Dilemma? As with last year’s blog posts, I am hewing to Gina’s advice to stay under a thousand words. So please tune in, in couple of weeks, and the story will be told. In the meantime, enjoy your literary – and culinary – travels.

**A Voice from the Classroom is the beginning of a new series of blog posts!**

6/20/10 Paragraph Six: On Buying Hyenas and the Limits of Perfection

I meant to break away from the topic of freewriting this week, but I came across a new one that I can’t ignore.

            I was facilitating a Curriculum Design Team workshop for the New York City Department of Education District 25 and 28 Magnet School Program. We always open our workshops with a freewrite. After the two minute silent writing session, teachers were sharing their work with a partner – as per the protocol I described in my June 7 post – when maniacal laughing, groaning and yelping sounds issued from a computer in one corner of the room.

            Running workshops is an existential occupation. Should I investigate? Try to get the teacher to turn the sounds down? Ask him to turn them UP and share them? What the hell was this hullaballoo, anyway?

            As usual, I took the path of least resistance and just let it go. When it came time for the partners to share with the whole group, Sharon Rosen, of IS 237, read the unrevised, unedited freewrite of her partner from the same school, the iconoclastic Paul Solomon:

            Consider the pros and cons of getting a pet hyena. Pros they make really cool noises. I think they are nocturnal so I could leave them out over night & would freak the neighbors. It would probably keep burglars away. It would deter ppl from walking their dogs by my house.

            Con. They would require a permit. They really are a pain to take care of. I’m sure they are expensive. So I don’t know.

            Sharon’s reply to Paul’s freewrite read as follows:

With pros like this, how could you not get one!

            Behind every freewrite lurks a story. This is Paul’s: A neighbor was walking a pit bull in Paul’s yard. (“A nice, friendly pit bull, but a pit bull all the same,” Paul explained.) Paul didn’t particularly appreciate this, hence the fantasies of protecting his yard with a hyena, which led to the freewrite, which was followed by the internet research into hyenas, which, in turn, led to the eerie yelps in the workshop. Interesting fact shared by Paul: Did you know that in some African villages people keep hyenas as pets? Apparently, they make good status symbols. (Don’t let Michael Vick in on this secret.)

            You can see why I had a hard time passing up this freewrite.

            At risk of messing up a perfectly good stand-alone story with treacly commercials, I offer three observations: (1) The freewrite gave Paul a chance to express his voice, which livened up the workshop; (2) the freewriting led to highly motivated research; and (3) the freewrite contained interesting formal qualities, i.e., it was very strong in what the 6+1 Writing Traits folks label ideas, organization, voice, sentence fluency and word choice.

            Okay, Paul’s piece was a little weak in the other traits, conventions and presentation, but hey, it was only a freewrite.

            Let’s explore these observations a little more in depth.

            (1) At first Paul was reluctant to have his freewrite shared, because he was afraid it was inappropriate for the workshop. Being the devil, or at least his advocate, that I am, I encouraged him. How many readers of this blog would disagree that student voice belongs in the classroom and that we’re taking ourselves a little too seriously in education these days? (If you do, let’s talk later over a drink. You can put your hands down for now.)

            (2) Don’t we want students doing exactly the kind of research Paul conducted? Along with writing, it’s one of the overarching skills students need to succeed in college. For more on this, check out David Conley’s article “Toward a More Comprehensive Conception of College Readiness,” published in 2007 by the Educational Policy Improvement Center. (I’ll flesh out this point in a future story about a 4^th grader writer’s research into rottweilers).

            (3) The formal qualities of the writing are interesting insofar as they appear in the freewrite, that is to say, right off the top of the mind of the writer. This is the theme I want to develop a little further. I’ll see if I can whittle it down to the 250 words of room left in this post.

            Freewriting can be seen as part of the writing process. Along with mind-mapping, outlining and the like, it is a form of prewriting, which leads to drafting, revising, editing, publishing, celebrating, etc. Just get those ideas out and we can shape them up later, sports fans!

            But here’s where things get interesting: the more you go through the writing process, reading and emulating good exemplars, the more your freewriting starts looking like a finished product.

            We all remember the concept of “limit” from calculus class, don’t we? (“A value that is approached increasingly closely by a function or a sequence as the independent variable increases without restriction,” as my math dictionary defines it.) Limits allow us to guesstimate the measurement of things that could otherwise never be determined with absolute precision, like the areas under arcs, the orbits of the planets, the trajectories of the bouquets (or are they tomatoes?) people are throwing at me for bringing calculus into this discussion. Well, the more we write (the independent variable without restriction), the closer we approach the value of the finished product the first time out with our freewrites.

            Paul has a compare/contrast essay underway in his freewrite. Could he have done that in the third grade? (Okay, Paul probably could, but could the rest of us?)

            I heard from his nephew Taylor Kitchings that Barry Hannah, the recently deceased Mississippi writer of quirky fiction, aspired to compose finished drafts the first time out. My wife, Elizabeth Fox, told me that Allen Ginsberg wanted to become mindful enough to accomplish the same goal…

            Oops, I’ve reached my word limit.  See you next week. Until then, try a few freewrites. The enjoyment to be derived is limitless.